DAY 5I’m wondering about the strategy behind the programming.: many of the quarterfinalists that we hear today are playing unabashedly all-romantic programs: Schumann and LIszt, Liszt and Rachmaninov, Scriabin and Chopin. The ones that don’t match this trend are largely playing virtuosic staples. It seems there was generally a lot of variety in the Preliminary round repertoire to give a rounded overview of one’s playing and now they dig into what one does best.----------Both Su Yeon Kim and Leonardo Pierdomenico paired nearly 15-minute long Liszt works with a nearly 30 minute romantic work of virtuosity. Both of their Liszt (Kim’s Vallee d’Obermann and Pierdomenico’s Ballade No. 2) can very easily succumb to ugly, unmusical playing. Both have incredibly lyrical sections but each hand is always split between melody and rhythmic/harmonic filigree of one kind or another. If you’re not listening so intently on the balance between the parts, and the resonance of the melody, you’re going to get bad Liszt playing that the Liszt haters always chide us LIszt lovers for. I thought both managed this task extremely well.----------Shmukler had a very orchestral Bach/Busoni Chaconne, and a very pianistic Petrushka. While I probably liked other performances of the latter better so far, his control was incredible. He was able to sustain extremely loud texture that was still well thought out and balanced. Then, he could contrast that with the softest, most delicate sounds. A rollercoaster for our ears!----------I must admit that I’ve never really listened to Scriabin’s 4th Sonata and after Dasol Kim’s performance, I’m eager to pull out the score and give it a closer study. In his playing, you clearer hear the delineation between the old Chopin elements and the new, truly Scriabin-esque elements. His Chopin Preludes were flawless technical events, and a lot of his musical decisions stood out too. In the C major prelude he drew out all the juicy appoggiaturas. He made a lot out of the easily cliched e minor, with an unrelenting through-line phrasing to the climax. In the Db major, he utilized some great left hand voicing in the B-section to make us forget that Chopin was just repeating himself over and over again. ----------Tristan Teo played Bach with quite a lot of harpsichord-esque detachment that I said earlier I was no fan of...But he really convinced me otherwise, given his polyphonic balance in the fugal sections. Not only was each voice simultaneously heard at any given time (vertically), each voice had a beautiful, sensitive shaping (horizontally). Very excited that he played the Kapustin Variations, such an entertaining piece, full of notes but well worth it. Teo let loose here after a more conservative Bach and Ravel. ----------The argument about facial expressions and hand gestures is inevitable in every competition. In 2013 it was Alessandro Deljavan. Today it will be over Martin James Bartlett. I always come down on musical decisions based on sound alone: does it matter if it's in the score, does it matter how you redistribute a passage if you can’t tell how it was written just from listening. But this is different because visuals can alter our interpretation of sound. Bartlett plays with plenty of hand and arm motions inherent in his physical approach to make the sounds, but plenty are added for dramatic flair. His facial expressions are quite over the top. I understand that they help performers, I do some, but isn’t there a reasonable limit? I hope I limit my facial expressions to what I do in normal day life and conversation; I can’t imagine that Bartlett ever naturally makes the facial expression he made as (or even before) he started Widmung. He’s someone I need to go back and listen to audio only (as I listened to his first recital) to see what I truly think; it was hard for me to take this one seriously. ----------It occurred to me that Daniel Hsu’s Chaconne sounded more like an organ. In the organ, you can change the color and sonority, but only at an appropriate time where you can shift the stops, not just by touch on the keys. Hsu had plenty of beautiful consistent and varied sound, and a variety of articulation, but it's his sense of time that precedes everything else. The most coveted thing an organist can change at any given moment is the manipulation of time for expressive purposes. I thought Hsu understands Bach (or Bach-like music, taking this Busoni arrangement, plus the Beethoven from the Prelims together) in this way. ----------Yutong Sun’s program wins as my favorite so far, even in only that he programmed the Eb/D# minor Prelude and Fugue. The Well-Tempered Clavier is my favorite Bach by far and I believe he’s the first one to play a selection in the competition. This is one of my favorites of the 48. And he played it right up my alley in terms of style: slow, restrained, very legato and a slightly romantic approach to rubato. His Bartok Sonata, a piece that easily falls into the trap of constant pesante playing, was an interesting take. It wandered a lot more than I’m used to hearing, and it made me wonder if there are more folk influences than I’d previously attributed to the piece. ----------More interesting programming to close the night, from Luigi Carroccia. He got his traditional fare in with some solid Chopin, then played two obscure works, both from composers not known for their concert music. Czerny, obviously is best known for his mindless exercises and slightly more musical etudes, if not known solely for being a student of Beethoven. But he also wrote plenty of concert works. I thought this was a really gutsy move as most people are going to listen to such a work with the predisposition that they are hearing music empty of substance, but only fluffed up on virtuosity. Meanwhile, Kabalevsky is known for his children’s piano music, and yet at least one Sonata was championed by Horowitz. I was especially excited by the Kabalevsky, it was not at all the kind of work I expected to hear. DAY 6Tchaidze opened the day with some Schubert. The Ab Impromptu can sound so monotonous, given that so many measures have the same rhythm: pick-up 8th note, followed by a quarter note and a dotted quarter note. If you play the same rhythmic nuance again and again the piece sounds so choppy. Tchaidze did not fall into this trap, every phrase sang through beautifully. His choice of Prokofiev’s 8th Sonata to close the program was satisfying. It doesn’t have the immediate appeal of the two before it, but has plenty of beautiful lyricism as well as requiring substantial chops. ----------I followed along in the score with Kenneth Broberg’s Scriabin 4th Sonata just to get a sense of the writing. Scriabin falls in line with several composers where the look of the music in the score does not belie how it actually sounds (consider Schumann where seemingly monotonous rhythmic patterns hide beautiful phrases and harmonic patterns). In Scriabin’s case, this music looks stuttered; so many rests and broken phrases that in performance, with pedal, have to sound like full sentences. I have extra respect for Broberg and Dasol Kim yesterday for pulling this off.Broberg’s Dante Sonata succeeded in the same way that So Yeon Kim and Pierdomenico did yesterday. Beautiful attention to shaping, rather than the virtuosity by itself. Furthermore, he added so much drama to this piece, the narrative elements were on display: the demonic sections extra aggressive, the spiritual sections extra romanticized. ----------I don’t recall Tony Yike Yang making as many faces in the first round as I noticed in the first movement of his Scriabin; but they seemed less frequent in the finale, and in his Liszt, so perhaps the more difficult, the more still his face is! I find his hand gestures largely uncontrived. I particularly loved his Liszt, more than most performances this round. It isn’t easy to capture the ebbs and flows of this piece, and he was able to engage the listener from beginning to end. I especially loved how much the second theme drove forward, while still capturing its majestic nature.----------I was born to love Hans Chen’s second program: a thorny Shostakovich Prelude and Fugue, 3 short works by a living composer, and the Liszt Sonata. The Ades I was most excited about. I don’t know these particular works but other pieces by the composer (check out Darkness Visible) have been mind blowing. He’s got a very special style, and writes very difficult music (being a great pianist himself), that is usually written in an obscure metric system. Hans Chen of course had these Mazurkas memorized and played them with so much sparkle. It’s hard to hear the Mazurka dance on first listen, but they danced in some way!It would take me another listen or two to describe exactly why I liked Chen’s Liszt so much, even more than Yang’s. There was something unsafe about it, perhaps----------Yekwon Sunwoo played Schubert’s c-minor Sonata like Beethoven, or maybe that’s partly because I’ve been listening to some of today’s competitors out of order and previous to this, had heard Rachel Kudo playing Beethoven Op. 31/3. The finales of each are not dissimilar in that each is a driving 6/8 meter with plenty of dance and drama, and they are in related keys of Eb/c. I think this Schubert is very appropriate to play like Beethoven, and I imagine the choice of c-minor was not unintentional for Franz, who was dying, having just experienced Beethoven die in the past year. The incessant rhythm of the finale can easily become monotonous, and by not shying away from intense climaxes, Sunwoo avoided the worst of it.----------If you think about Sonata form being all about the structural dissonance resulting from the modulation away from the home key, and ultimating rectifying that musical material back to the tonic (as some theorists do), Rachmaninoff’s music fits into that box with much difficulty. I find it especially obvious in this first sonata: it’s not enough to have two themes, each in a different key to begin with, the modulation is an essential part of the drama. His second sonata is more popular I think, specifically because it doesn’t try to be a grant sonata in the way the first movement does. Brevity was Rachmaninoff’s friend when writing for solo piano!The first movement tends to wander aimlessly in the exposition. The development affords lots of excitement, though, given that section's ability to adapt to any number of composer’s styles, such as Rachmaninoff’s own. Honggi Kim is in fine form in this section, putting Rachmaninoff’s orchestration of the piano into beautiful sound. I wish the rest of the piece could hold my attention, but the pianist is always fighting an uphill battle in this piece. ----------I wonder how strict the Cliburn is on their time limits? Rachel Kudo began Carnaval, a half hour work, nearly 20 minutes into her 45 minute recital and without going off in between pieces, her recital ran to 50 minutes. There’s no way that program was going to fit into the time slot. Yesterday, Daniel Hsu’s program ran a couple minutes over (but he went off in between pieces), but Yuri Favorin’s program was over 50 minutes long too. ----------Jurinic chose what for me would be the most daunting composer to begin a recital with-Debussy. When you’re so exposed in terms of color and control, I’d rather have had a chance to sink into the piano first. There were a couple moments I questioned the consistency of his texture, but it might have been my imagination. His Images were beautifully crafted, voiced and shaped. I think Debussy’s music responds well to a subtle rubato, and he had it perfectly timed to complement his pianistic colors. He chose another long romantic sonata, whose composer doesn’t necessarily fit sonata form well. Maybe there’s a way for me to shift my listening to understand this music better, but I haven’t figured out how to reconcile classical form with romantic composition. I love them both, just rarely together. It seems these pieces work well moment-by-moment, rather than in the long term. I was waiting for Jurinic to have a truly Schumann-esque moment of fantasy, and I never really heard it. The primary theme of the first movement could use a lot of impetuous drive, but I heard it stay rather ‘in the pocket’. Or his shaping of lyrical phrases seemed overly-planned, rather than spontaneous. ----------I decided to give my hand at predictions today, as I won't check the results until the morning. My favorite recital of this round goes to Yutong Song. Top 12 is: Su Yeon Kim, Pierdomenico, Dasol Kim, Bartlett, Hsu, Sun, Tchaidze, Broberg, Cheung, Yang, Sunwoo, Chen.----------And I was 10 for 12. I included Su Yeon Kim and Bartlett, the jury did not, instead choosing Favorin and Honggi Kim. It appears Bartlett has become the audience favorite in the competition, a lot of social media commentary is most upset about his exclusion. I admired his first recital especially, and can see why many would gravitate to him.

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​"Modern performers seem to regard their performances as texts rather than acts, and to prepare for them with the same goal as present-day textual editors: to clear away accretions. Not that this is not a laudable and necessary step; but what is an ultimate step for an editor should be only a first step for a performer, as the very temporal relationship between the functions of editing and performing already suggests." -Richard Taruskin, ​Text and Act